Fringe to Foundation: Aligning Business Goals and Lifting Business Performance through Digital Workflows

You Deserve To Know About Things That Will Make Your Business Better

Every business in the marketplace, from freelancer and entrepreneur to the largest of enterprises, is facing tremendous pressure to change how they do business. Workers demand more options for balancing business with personal life; consumers demand more and different modes of interaction; and business stakeholders continue to demand positive performance even as the pace of change increases.

Digital, social and mobile aren’t fringe considerations in business any more.

People use their phones all the time to do all sorts of things, and a lot of the time those “things” impact the business. From apps and processes that support how work gets done to the policies that guide various aspects of operation and interaction, businesses are discovering that embracing digital workflows and emerging operating models is the new imperative. Every interaction is a transaction, and there are many possible actors collaborating on each one. How well understood is this activity within the business?

From within and without businesses are forced to react to various influences shaping user and consumer behavior, adjusting their processes and creating new core workflows to address digital data, online, social and mobile models that were once considered to be more fringe than foundation. Few businesses, particularly those smaller companies where only one or a few participants do all the work, have a central framework in place to support the vast array of processes and tasks they perform, and even less to help adjust to changing business requirements.

Relying more on individual knowledge than documented processes and structure, small businesses are generally able to retain their agility only as long as they also retain their small size.

What is usually missing in the small business is a foundational workflow system and framework which sets the table for future improvements within the business, and establishes the flexibility to support faster execution while saving costs and reducing investment.

Most business owners don’t consider a workflow-driven system to be an imperative, focusing more on the solutions which address specific operational tasks and activities. This approach may meet business needs for a short time, but the sprawl and distribution of business data and activities enabled with the bolt-on “app” approach often fragments things rather than tying them closely together.

Doing things right in the beginning saves time, effort and money compared to fixing things later.

Businesses should create an organizational structure and employee culture that is “process aware”, developed and built on the solid foundation of structured workflows.  This gives the entire organization a visible basis for improvement at any level, allowing a focus on work attitude and operations that are positive and healthier for the company.

It has been proven time and time again that implementing a flexible framework for structuring workflow within the business will help the enterprise improve performance, undertake efforts to support better decision-making, and achieve a competitive advantage. The structure, crossing all functional boundaries and taking a holistic view of the processes, helps ensure that stakeholder perspectives are aligned, makes sure that everyone has a clear understanding of how processes are undertaken and why, and ultimately focuses all organizational efforts towards the right goal.

This is the introductory article in a series which will discuss the values of a structured workflow solution applied to small and growing businesses and why every business large or small should immediately implement such a system.

The discussion focuses on a solution which I believe presents the framework and extensibility required to address the essential needs of business process management along with the flexibility in design to address more unique and sophisticated flows and integrations.

Meet Exact Synergy Enterprise.

The series will discuss WHY businesses must consider implementing workflow and process management and how Synergy meets those needs.  Further, we’ll take a look at a successful QuickBooks consultant and developer who implements Synergy internally and for their clients. That article explores how their Synergy-founded professional time and billing solution works with QuickBooks, addressing time and resource management requirements that other solutions couldn’t provide.

The discussion then addresses how bookkeepers, consultants and other QuickBooks advisors can quickly and easily implement a structured workflow solution that delivers immediate value to the business. With out-of-the-box functionality to address essential business processes and activity management including CRM, document management, human resources management and more, there is little or no configuration required making the solution useful on the first launch.

The final article takes a look at Synergy implemented in a business, demonstrating the extensive ability for the system to be custom configured directly by the customer. It is the ability to be customized easily, meeting specific process requirements and connecting to the applications and data that round out the operations that makes Synergy particularly powerful and a key component to enabling a successful transformation into an agile, high performance business in the digital age.

syn·er·gy

the interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects.

 cooperation interaction, cooperation, combined effort, give and take

 

Make Sense?

J